REAV

Glossary

Right to Repair

Directive (EU) 2024/1799

The EU directive obliging manufacturers to repair certain products at a reasonable price and within a reasonable time, including after the legal guarantee has expired.

Directive (EU) 2024/1799 entered into force on 30 July 2024 and applies from 31 July 2026, the deadline by which member states had to transpose it into national law. Covered products include washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, electronic displays, mobile phones, tablets and servers.

Two provisions carry the most operational weight. The repair obligation is not limited to newly sold products. It reaches equipment already in consumers’ hands. And a consumer who chooses repair over replacement gets a twelve-month extension of the legal guarantee, dated from completion of the repair.

Because it is a directive, not a regulation, the text a manufacturer actually answers to is one of 27 national laws, and the details differ between them.

The structural effect is a step change in repair volume with no matching step change in repair capacity. Manufacturers and retailers now need repair throughput they largely do not own, which is precisely the gap industrial repair operations exist to fill.

How REAV builds repair capacity from scratch

Related terms

  • AGEC law The French circular-economy law that introduced the repairability index, the durability index and a wave of new producer-responsibility obligations.
  • Repairability index A score displayed at the point of sale rating how easily a product can be repaired, introduced in France and now being folded into a broader durability score.
  • ESPR & Digital Product Passport The EU framework that sets ecodesign requirements per product group and attaches a machine-readable Digital Product Passport to each item.
  • First-time fix rate The share of repairs that pass final quality control on the first attempt, without rework or a second pass.

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